Samuel Butler

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

We didn’t actually overspend our budget. The allocation simply fell short of our expenditure.

They usually have two tellers in my local bank, except when it’s very busy, when they have one.

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that’s subtraction!

Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

When I started to make more or less serious money – for those times – then, of course, I wanted to show everyone that life is different: it’s a new kind of life; we are earning this money. We wanted to pay taxes and live honestly.

Never spend your money before you have it.

I made my money the old-fashioned way. I was very nice to a wealthy relative right before he died!

In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

When a fellow says it ain’t the money but the principle of the thing, it’s the money.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

You can’t tell a millionaire’s son from a billionaire’s.

Money is something you have to make in case you don’t die.